Scientists didn't realize it till later, thinking that they were just the offspring of a larger species.  Only .64 inches (16mm) in size, smaller than your finger nail, the pygmy seahorse is a miniscule wonder, inhabiting coral in the tropical waters of the western Pacific.  It is, amazingly, the world's smallest seahorse species yet discovered.

The orange marine animals are masters of camouflage, a characteristic which may have protected them from the over-exploitation threatening other types of seahorses, though they still face danger, like underwater tourism.

"Divers and photographers could possibly love these animals to death," said Sara Lourie, a McGill University biologist who led the identification project.

In light of how many other seahorse species scientists believe have yet to be discovered, the find isn't necessarily surprising.  Before this discovery there were 32 known species of seahorses, but some scientists speculate that there could be as many as 50.

In any case, though the find was physically small, the news of it was huge.

Monkeys Just Don't Type Shakespeare
by Jonathan Drake
S: JSOnline (5-9-03)

All you can really do is just sit back and laugh.

Researchers at Plymouth University in England reported last month that primates left alone with a computer attacked the machine and failed to produce a single word.

Why perform such an experiment?  Thomas Huxley, a 19th-century scientist who supported Charles Darwin's theories of evolution, has been attributed to the notion that monkeys typing at random will eventually produce literature.  Mathematicians also have used it to illustrate concepts of chance.

This experiment, at least, proved them wrong.

To be fair, it was more of a project, and not a scientific experiment.  After the students left a computer in the monkey enclosure at Paignton Zoo in southwest England, home to six Sulawesi crested macaques, they closed the door and anxiously waited.

At first, said researcher Mike Phillips, "the lead male got a stone and started bashing the hell out of it."

Later, many of them enjoyed "defecating and urinating all over the keyboard."

But eventually, to some success, monkeys Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe and Rowan produced five pages of text, composed mostly of the letter S.  "They pressed a lot of S's," Phillips said. "Obviously, English isn't their first language."

It goes without saying that, given the odds, monkeys will never type out a complete sentence, let alone the works of Shakespeare.  The idea is altogether absurd, and sheds light (or darkness) on evolution as a whole.

Neandertals Not Our Ancestors
by Jonathan Robison
S: NationalGeographic.com (5-14-03)

Recently, a team of geneticists from Italy and Spain compared the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of two Cro-Magnons that were dated 23,000 and 25,000 years old respectively, four Neandertal specimens, dated 29,000 to 42,000 years old, and a large database of modern human mtDNA in an endeavor to shed some light on our past.

What they found was that, in essense, the Cro-Magnon mtDNA fit well within the spectrum of genetic variation exhibited by modern Europeans, but differed sharply from that of the Neandertals.  Their conclusions based on this research is that it is unlikely that Neandertals contributed to the current European gene pool.

As Giorgio Bertorelle puts it, a geneticist at University di Ferrara in Italy, and a co-author of the study, "Our results add to the evidence collected previously in different fields, making the hypothesis of a 'Neandertal heritage' very unlikely."

And so, in their own words, Neandertals were not our ancestors.  Question is, what were Neandertals?

The issue is highly debated.  Some believe them to have been Homo-Sapiens (humans) with calcium accumulation, lack of iodine, and a vitamin D deficiencies due to the harsh inland environment.  Others, a type of evolutionary link.

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